Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
This may be a controversial statement, but any ship large enough to support a crew is too large to be a realistic option for interstellar travel. Space is big, unfathomably big, and the problem of venturing between stars has occupied theorists for quite a long time, leading to some audacious proposals. To see how vast... Continue Reading →
I'm a little late to the party with this one---Ad Astra came out a while ago, now---but I just saw it in theaters, and boy do I have an opinion on it. My expectations were sky-high going in. I'd been looking forward to Ad Astra since it was announced (it was pitched as Heart of Darkness in... Continue Reading →
Last week I posted a review of the 1963 film A Dream Come True, about a Soviet expedition to Mars, and today I'm going to share the Mars mission the Soviets were actually planning when that movie came out. It was... ambitious, to say the least. "Nuclear-powered Mars train from pole to pole" levels of ambitious.... Continue Reading →
This site's been on hiatus for a little while, but I'm back, and I'm kicking it off again with a review of a hidden gem of Soviet science fiction: A Dream Come True. It's an hour-long film from 1963, depicting first contact between humanity and an advanced alien race known as the Centurians. The aliens are... Continue Reading →
Here we will explore how not to write a science fiction novel. Now, I really wanted to like The Killing Star. Pellegrino and Zebrowski's novel is beloved in some sci-fi circles, and I can see why: their vision of the galaxy is a brutal place, where any civilization becomes an existential threat the moment it develops... Continue Reading →
Somewhere between the current human presence in the space—zilch, save for three people aboard the ISS—and the most ambitious, wide-eyed, optimistic visions for colonization—Musk's million people on Mars, Bezos' trillions throughout the solar system—there's a middle ground where we work on and explore other planets, but inhabit them only in the same sense that we... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: I’m sure many of us are familiar with the book and film The Martian, in which NASA ends up with one of its astronauts stranded alone on another world, and has to mount a desperate effort to rescue him. As far as space mishaps go, that is one of the most... Continue Reading →
Post by AJ Rise: Biology’s reputation as a “soft” science is ill-deserved. It’s a field of many wonders still unknown to mankind, and endless possibility. I think it likely that many of the technological advancements in the near future will be rooted in the deep study of living systems. Millions of years of evolution have... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: I was browsing the internet today, as I do entirely too often, and I came across this gem of an article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation By "gem," I mean "whiny dumpster fire." Sheesh. Though perhaps I'm not being charitable enough, because the author, Zahaan Bharmal, is at least hesitantly in favor of space colonization,... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: Well, here's the second part of my review of Neil Clarke's Galactic Empires. Here I will tackle the book's latter twelve stories, twelve tales of weirdness and wonder, and try to make sense of how this anthology fits together, if it does at all. “A Cold Heart” by Tobias S. Buckell: When... Continue Reading →
